If a few early adopters chip in, we should be able to afford this, now that BTC has almost hit 20 USD!

The advert will be aimed at decision makers who are not familiar with Bitcoin yet.

The point of the advert is to pre-emptively debunk gross misconceptions about Bitcoin.

If the first thing they hear about Bitcoin is that it's "an online form of money laundering", then this misconception will stick. And it will be perpetuated by mainstream media.

If the first thing they hear about Bitcoin is that it's "an open, decentralised accounting system where all transactions are public" they are going to have a hard time imagining it is "a form of money laundering"

But we need to be fast!

I reckon it's 2-4 weeks max now, before the tabloids are all over Bitcoin. We are at a pivotal point now. Let's do everything in our power to make Bitcoin successful.

wanted to bounce this idea off the community first before posting a bounty...

The free healthcare that I get in this country has saved my life on several occasions... if it was like the American system then my parents would have lost their house long ago.

A healthcare system that is only free for those who have serious/catastrophic conditions can be funded by a $100/month compulsory insurance rather than a 50% tax on everyone's income.

The problem with a system where everything is free for everyone, even for people who could easily afford to pay $5000 for a IVF treatment out of their own pocket, is that people overuse it, leading to ever increasing costs and eventually, severe rationing or state bankruptcy.

Anyhow, the American public healthcare system isn't shit because there is a lack of government funding. It's shit because it's wasteful. The American government spends the roughly same amount of money per capita on healthcare as the German government. No joke. (source: WHO).

I know it dismays a lot of hardcore crypto-anarchists on this forum, but I am a happy, law abiding, tax paying US citizen And I think bitcoin's best path to success will be to work within existing government regulations.

The same way that air travel's path to success was to work within existing regulations? (before manned flight was invented, people owned all airspace above their land).

No, regulations will need to adapt to new technologies. Not the other way around.

Oh no, my browser crashed because of fucking flash player (on a different site) while I was waiting for the transaction to arrive. Now I'm going to have to pay another 0.02 btc. Consider the first payment a donation

The world market for commercial CP is rather small because it's, well, a "niche product", and most producers of CP are sadists who don't do it for commercial gain.

commercial CP will only ever constitiute a tiny, negligible part of the Bitcoin economy.

once the low-hanging fruit have been picked by law enforcement, CP trading is probably going to happen over extremely secretive darknets and friend-to-friend networks, where it's out of sight, out of mind, as far as politicians and mainstream media are concerned.

That's why I don't think it's going to destroy Bitcoin.

Also, there is probably tons of CP bouncing around the Tor network and that hasn't brought about its destruction.

If law enforcement can develop tools and techniques to catch criminals using bitcoin they will have effectively proved that bitcoin's implementation does not provide adequate anonymity or security.

I disagree.

Just like Tor, bitcoin can never be 100% anonymous. An investigation team with enough manpower and time on its hands can track down any bitcoin user, with one exception: The bitcoin user who never spends a single bitcent in his wallet.dat. But what use are bitcoins if you can't spend them?

However it is anonymous enough for most people going about their daily honest business. Discovering the identity of bitcoin users takes a large amount of resources, so governemnt will only ever bother going after serious criminals, while ordinary people can enjoy the benefits of financial privacy.

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Whether or not you agree with what certain people do with bitcoin, it's purpose is to prevent ANY central authority from having control over the financial system. This includes governments. If a government has a way to prevent, manipulate, or track transactions at will, then bitcoin will have no purpose whatsoever.

They can't control Bitcoin itself. All they can do is prevent selected individuals from spending their bitcoins using traditional police work.

There's an important point here which I have made which I'm not sure you have understood: The details, at this point, are irrelevant. Bitcoin is the first currency to solve the problem it solves. No other currencies of that nature can possibly beat the enormous momentum that bitcoin has. No bitcoin alternatives will survive for the same reason no alternative WWW protocols will survive, or no alternative internet protocols will survive, or no alternative set of microprocessor instructions will survive, etc., UNLESS they solve a different problem than the problem solved by bitcoin.

oh just like how no social network could possibly overtake friendster. or no payment method could overtake paypal.I see your point.

Network effects for Bitcoin are stronger than for Facebook.

Joining the losing social networking site results in a minor inconvenience the day you switch to the winning one.

Joining the losing p2p cryptocurrency results in substantial financial losses the day you switch to the winning one.

I don't wanna be part of a new elite replacing the old one. Fuck the yachts. If I become a Bitcoin Billionaire I'm going to open entrepreneurial academies and startup incubators in developing countries.